Webinar: Geospatial Data Act of 2017 —JOIN IN next Tuesday, Aug. 29, at 1 p.m. CDT for an informative webinar regarding the Geospatial Data Act legislation that could effectively exclude everyone but licensed professionals from federal contracts for GIS and mapping services of all kinds — not just those services traditionally provided by surveyors. Details HERE!

Pipeline Week, Oct. 3-5, Westin Galleria, Houston —REGISTER! Early Bird Registration Extended to Sept. 1! For all the information on attending and exhibiting, take a look HERE. GITA members receive discounts on exhibitor floor space and individual registration!

Spar 3DOver time, geospatial data has become as important as the geospatial application itself, since both are necessary components for a working GIS. With demand for proprietary and third-party data growing, open-source and proprietary GIS vendors have each responded in their own way. Both parties agree that location data is a commodity — but not on who should have access to it.READ MORE

Inside GNSS In an effort to offset problems caused by loss of GNSS signals — a potentially dangerous situation for first responders among others — a team from Draper Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed advanced vision-aided navigation techniques for unmanned aerial vehicles that do not rely on external infrastructure, such as GNSS, detailed maps of the environment or motion capture systems. READ MORE

AFCEAGeospatial imagery as well as facial recognition and other biometrics are driving the intelligence community's research into artificial intelligence. Other intelligence activities, such as human language translation and event warning and forecasting, also stand to gain from advances being pursued in government, academic and industry research programs funded by the community's research arm.READ MORE

Sensors & SystemsAccording to authors of a new study from the American Geophysical Union, it is "extremely unlikely" that 2014, 2015 and 2016 would have been the warmest consecutive years on record without the influence of human-caused climate change.
Temperature records were first broken in 2014, when that year became the hottest year since global temperature records began in 1880. READ MORE

Directions MagazineSony's once ubiquitous Walkman gave way to Apple's iPod, which in turn was eclipsed by smartphones as storage densities leapt from tape (magnetic) to disc (optical) to semiconductor (and soon, molecular transistors). Storage has become the ultimate commodity — infinitely scalable, invisible and on-demand.
Likewise, today's data delivery is seamless, wireless and cloud-based. READ MORE

GeoConnexionThe European Space Agency spacecraft Solar Orbiter is in the final stages of spacecraft integration at the Airbus spacecraft assembly hall in Stevenage, U.K.
Solar Orbiter will be launched in February 2019 into a close orbit around the sun and will allow scientists to study the solar corona in much more detail, for much longer periods, and at a much closer distance that can ever be reached here on the ground, or for that matter, by any spacecraft circling the Earth. READ MORE

FedScoopAt the end of July, the Office of Management and Budget and the Center for Open Data Enterprise co-hosted a Roundtable on Open Data for Economic Growth. This event, previously described in FedScoop, demonstrated the Trump administration's support for open government data as a resource for American business. It was also an opportunity for the private sector to have their say.READ MORE

Network WorldIf you've been stuck in traffic, you'll appreciate Atlanta's innovative new approach to keep things moving smoothly.
Traffic jams are unpredictable and collecting real-time data over a large area is difficult. The City of Atlanta streamlines traffic with a city-wide system where every driver becomes a mobile traffic sensor and crowdsourced data improves traffic flow.READ MORE